This week the different effects of demography is the thread to follow. An interview with Neil Smith brings up the debate over ‘supply side’ and ‘demand side’ explanations for gentrification. Crudely put, the former privileges the strategies of large-scale players in the market, the latter an evolution of life-style/cultural preferences. But both views rely ultimately on the growth/decline of the population and its composition in terms of household size and income.

Push and Displace
From the late 1990s the Berlin government promoted a ‘Property Strategy’ devised to increase the number of privately held apartments. This meant both new construction and the transformation of rental into privately owned apartments.

Lastly here is link to a map of the QuartierManagement areas in Berlin, established on the basis of research on social polarisation in the 1990s, and another which indicates the current sanierungsgebiet (urban renewal areas).